North York's Person of the Year: Patrick Chan

North York’s best chance to bring home Olympic gold

For all his ordinariness — he likes movies, music, video games, Jessica Alba, hanging at the mall — Patrick Chan is anything but a typical teenager. He has a particular obsession with climbing mountains, both literally and figuratively. This year, for example, when he wasn’t scaling 8,000-foot peaks in Banff, Chan was triple Axeling his way to skating glory. He won his second consecutive Canadian Men’s Figure Skating Championship gold medal, the Four Continents crown and a silver medal at the World Championships.

Now, the 18-year-old, who makes his home with Mom and Dad near Yonge and York Mills, is gearing up for the biggest competition of his life, the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver. Chan is one of the most recognizable faces of Team Canada, and he’s widely considered a frontrunner to reach the podium. On top of all that, he’s just so darn, well, nice. So is it any wonder that we’ve named him our 2009 Person of the Year for North York?

“Patrick is a wonderful role model for all Canadians,” says Canadian Olympic Committee CEO Chris Rudge. “He represents the best of what we like to see in all our young people. He shows the positive influence that sport can have in a person’s life, whether they’re going for gold at the Olympics or just participating for fun.” Obviously Chan is a dedicated athlete. You can’t win national and world titles by being a typical teenage slacker. Not that he didn’t try sometimes.

“Patrick is a terrific student and a good person all around,” says Chan’s coach Don Laws, who helped guide Scott Hamilton to Olympic gold 25 years ago in Sarajevo. “It’s been a lot of fun to work with him.” Unlike Hamilton, though, Chan presents his own unique challenges for the veteran coach. “There are days when he’ll come to the rink tired because he had been up late playing video games the night before, but once he’s on the ice, it’s all work.”

Perhaps if there’s a knock against Chan, it’s one of the very things that makes him so remarkable — his youth. As with many young people, he’s known for saying what he thinks without worrying about how it might be perceived. It’s his guileless off-the-cuff nature that led to a very public war of words with French skater Brian Joubert during this year’s World Championships in Los Angeles.

Joubert won the Worlds in 2007 but finished second to Canadian Jeffrey Buttle in 2008. Heading into this year’s competition, Joubert complained at length about the lack of elite skaters capable of performing a quadruple jump while those skaters like him who did perform the quad were not being given enough credit by the judges. He went so far as to say it was a miscarriage of justice for a guy without a quad to win the world championship.

Chan responded in atypical fashion for a Canadian athlete — he blasted Joubert right back in interviews by calling him a “sore loser” who makes excuses for bad performances. “It’s not sportsmanship. Tiger Woods is not going to say, ‘Mike Weir sucks because he can’t hit it as far as I can,’” Chan said at the time. Then, after talking the talk, Chan walked the walk, er, skated the skate, out duelling the Frenchman with a pair of triple Axels that relegated his rival to bronze. It wasn’t exactly a Tonya Harding versus Nancy Kerrigan–style tire iron to the kneecap, but it did grab media attention, and it proved that despite his age he wasn’t about to be pushed around or intimidated by the competition.

“Patrick has always been his own person, very confident, self-assured,” says Christine Popiel, Chan’s guidance counsellor at Ecole secondaire Etienne-Brûlé, which he graduated from in June. And while Chan may have been a champion figure skater, Popiel says you’d never know it from the way he carried himself at school. “He was so respectful and gracious, and I think he was really very shy about his skating, in a sense. He took it very seriously, but he didn’t want to come across as anything other than just another student at the school.

“It was also remarkable the way he was able to handle all the newfound attention — the media, TV commercials — being a public figure all of a sudden,” she continues. Figure skating is one of the most popular winter sports in Canada, and with back-to-back Canadian titles and a silver at the Worlds, Chan has fast become an athlete celebrity, one with a great shot at Olympic gold.

Olympic gold. It has a nice ring to it. But that’s a lot of pressure on a kid making his Games debut in front of what is essentially a hometown crowd. “It’s a daunting task, but you have to believe, having watched what he’s been able to do, that there’s every reason he will handle it,” says Tracy Wilson, a commentator for CBC and NBC who won bronze at the 1988 Calgary Games.

There are probably six or seven skaters with a chance at the podium in Vancouver. Chan has admitted he’s a little scared although not for the reasons you may think. “Everyone seems to hold back and kind of go in their own corner,” said Chan in a recent interview. “I think I’m the type of person who’s really outgoing and always really friendly. But it’s really scary. I’m scared to smile because I’m scared the next guy’s going to think I’m laughing at him or something. They’re just so into what they’re doing.”

And that’s when you realize that, no matter how seriously Chan takes figure skating, no matter how much of his time is spent practising and competing, it’s not his whole life. He does it because it’s fun, not because it’s a job. Heck, he says he can’t even imagine competing after the 2010 Olympics.

“He really loved the business and law courses he took in school,” says Popiel. “And he always talked about going into business at university, that skating was just something he did right now. It never seemed like it would be his whole career.” Earlier this year, Chan received a $3,000 World Chinese Entrepreneurs Scholarship that he may put to use when it’s time to head off to university.

One thing is for certain: right now Chan is focused on adding to his medal collection in Vancouver. As Rudge says, “Olympic athletes, even the really laid-back ones, don’t dream of finishing 12th and listening to the German national anthem being played.” When Chan takes the ice in February, the eyes of the nation, especially those of his North York neighbourhood, will be on him.

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